None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism.

. . .  the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition.

THIS WEEK I'LL BE POSTING some of what is said about the Crucifixion as the prophetic witness of Jesus in Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination.  

It is the crucifixion of Jesus that is the decisive criticism of the royal consciousness.  The crucifixion of Jesus is not to be understood simply in good liberal fashion as the sacrifice of a noble man, nor should we too quickly assign a cultic, priestly theory of atonement to the event.  Rather we might see in the crucifixion of Jesus the ultimate act of prophetic criticism in which Jesus announces the end of the world of death (the same announcement as that of Jeremiah) and takes that death into his own person.  Therefore we say that the ultimate criticism is that God himself embraces the death that his people must die.  The criticism consists not in standing over against but in standing with; the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition.  The contrast is stark and total;  this passionate man set in the midst of numbed Jerusalem.  And only the passion can finally penetrate the numbness.

A number of years ago I posted something about someone I heard on the radio, a modern sophisticated non-religious person whose young son became very interested in becoming a Catholic.  Why, she wanted to know, when she went to the church with him, did anyone want to look on the hideous image of a tortured, executed man, executed in one of the worst manners sadistic dictatorial power has found to sadistically kill and, as an act of terror for the population,  display the tortured, murdered victim someone.  Why, she wanted to know, couldn't they choose something pleasant to look at instead of a crucifix?  Her son said, who would bother to notice something like that?  

If early First Century Jerusalem is numbed, the United States, the entire modern world is at least as numbed.  When Marjory Taylor Greene or some other Republican-fascist makes a show of "Christian nationalism" they are advocating something as corrupt as the Roman imperial occupation and likely far more corrupt than the corrupted Chief Rabbinate and his court in the degraded Temple.  The very people who killed Jesus.  There isn't one of them who I would doubt would play the role of Pilate in the story only without any kind of qualms.  

The corruption of Easter into something no more significant than candy and new clothes and the rest of the Easter Parade of commercial tackiness, something that many of the churches are in on and certainly the most typical American notice of the day with little to say about the undermining of the "world of competence and competition" that has entirely supplanted anything like a real Christian culture in the modern period.

But, as it's always necessary to point out, I certainly wouldn't want to go back to any previous observance of Holy Week and Easter because it inevitably got mixed in with things which may have in many cases been more charming or interesting than the chocolate eggs and greeting card companies anthropomorphized bunnies and the crappy pop music of the season, but they were on the same side of what has become so nauseating about the American version of the holiday.  The only way for a holiday to escape the American commercial trivialization of it is to be so insignificant as to escape that treatment.  Creating a national holiday for the remembrance of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. has certainly done far more to trivialize him and for his enemies to co-opt his memory than it has to hear his message. It was a really bad idea, instead of parades they should have held sit-ins or unauthorized readings of the suppressed words of the man.  Considering what they've done to the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, it was bound to happen in that case.

That phase Brueggemann constructed about "competence and competition" is certainly shorthand for the modern Western culture that the Crucifixion of Jesus, its prophetic meaning, is opposed to.  I don't remember where I recently heard the idea that there is nothing more powerless than dead and it's clear in the Gospels that Jesus was consciously putting himself on the road to death when he turned his face to Jerusalem even as he told his followers what was coming for him and for them.  

The radical criticism embodied in the crucifixion can be discerned in the "passion announcements" of Mark:

And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).

The son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him;  and when he is killed after three days he will rise (9:31).

Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles  and they will mock him, and spit on him, and scourge him, and kill him;  and after three days he will rise (10:33-34).

There is no more radical criticism than these statements, for they announce that the power of God takes the form of death and that real well-being and victory only appear via death.  So the sayings dismantle the dominant theories of power by asserting that all such would-be power is in fact no-power. Thus the passion announcements of Jesus are the decisive dismissal of every self-serving form of power upon which the royal consciousness is based.  Just that formula, Son of man must suffer - Son of man/suffer! - is more than the world can tolerate, for the phrase of ultimate power, "Son of man," has as its predicate the passion to death.  It is true that no precise counterpart can be found in the history of Moses.  Moses never speaks or acts that way, but we may pause to discern important continuities between the two.  Moses also dismantled the empire and declared it to be no-power (remember Exodus 8:18) by disregarding the claims of the imperial reality and trusting fully in the Lord of justice and freedom.  In parallel fashion, the dominant power is dismantled by appealing to an uncredentialed God.

Could there be anything more uncongenial to the modernistic, learned sensibility than "an uncredentialed God?"  In reading Mark's Gospel as translated with what he says is faithful rhetorical style to the Greek original, David Bently Hart presents Mark as if it were an uneducated person narrating an eye-witness account of things. I have to say it is the most compelling translation of Mark's Gospel I've yet read.  Compared to it the Contemporary English Version reads like one of the smarter seniors in high school was saying it.

That the passion sayings of Jesus constitute the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness is evident in the reaction of the faithful:  First (Mark 8:32-33) Peter, on behalf of the church, rejects the criticism as too radical and he is roundly reprimanded.  Second (9:32), the disciples did not understand and are afraid to ask.  Third (10:35-37), they respond, indicating they understood nothing, by fresh dispute about their own power and authority.  The criticism of Jesus is too radical, not only for the imperial manager but also for his own followers.  None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism.

When, inevitably, the annual snark about Mark's Gospel having no mention of the Resurrection is dragged out again, those passages above certainly prove that it is contained in the Text.  I, personally, find the theory that early in the transmission of Mark that the end of the scroll was lost from it, entirely believable. It's not as if it was likely the scribe who lettered that earliest copy which cuts off so abruptly had any way to check on the ending by looking at another copy.  I wouldn't be surprised if the extant copies of the Gospel at that point might have been fewer than a hundred.  It's not as if books that survive from that period are found in numbers. If that loss happened very early in the history of the book, I'd guess much less than a hundred copies would have existed.  The fragility of the transmission of texts in the manuscript based period accounts for a lot more than our modern habits of thought might take notice of. It's clear that far from being silent on it, Mark presents the Resurrection as a crucial part of the phenomenon of Jesus and figured heavily in the only reason the writer of the Gospel would have been writing the account to start with.  That modern snark about the "original ending of Mark" is a better example of the habit of "skeptical" atheists of ignoring the whole text and what it says.  I've got to say that was one of the things I found most enlightening about modernism, how intellectually dishonest it is. And so resistant to that criticism, perhaps another clue to why they detest Jesus so much.

I'll wait to comment on more of the Easter evergreens of modernistic mockery as they might come in.